The Spider's House (26 page)

“Seven hundred!” he exclaimed. “But I have a fine room for eight. You’re being royally rooked.” It was too good to be true, that she might move here. He decided to say no more, for fear she might sense his eagerness and change her mind.

“I’d like to talk with the manager and see what they have, at least.”

“The place is pretty empty. Which brings me to a question I’ve been wanting to ask you. How does it happen you’re wandering around Morocco alone, this year of all years?”

She looked at him fixedly, as if debating the wisdom of entering the conversational room whose door he was holding open for her. A second later she seemed to have made her decision, but he could not tell whether it had been made with full confidence in him or with certain reserves. And the fact that the question of confidence had arisen at all in his mind reopened an airless chamber of his past where suspicion had been mandatory and trust in others a matter open to hourly question.

“This year of all years,” she echoed. “That’s the answer. I’d always wanted passionately to see Morocco, and I had an awful premonition that I’d better come now or I’d miss it altogether.”

“Why?” He thought he knew what she meant, but he wanted to be sure.

“Well, my God, look at the papers!” she cried. “It doesn’t take any great brain to see what’s happening.” Now he felt almost certain that she had divined his thought, and was on the defensive. “There’s a little war in progress here. There won’t be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate.” (But it’s hard to feign innocence if you’ve eaten the apple, he reflected.) “And it looks to me as if it
is
going to go on, because the French aren’t going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren’t, because they can’t. They’re fighting with their backs to the wall.”

“I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war,” he lied.

“That’s the least of my worries. When
that
comes, we’ve had it. You can’t sit around mooning about Judgment Day. That’s just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing’s changed at all.”

A little Algerian waiter, who sometimes served as assistant barman, had come up to the table.

“Vous prenez que’que chose, Monsieur Stenhamme?” he inquired.

“Coffee?” Stenham asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Yes. I might as well. I’ll be hopped up all afternoon, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Or have a liqueur.”

“Cointreau, Chartreuse, Pippermenthe, Crème de Cacao, Grand Marnier, Whiskey, Benedictine, Armagnac, Gin, Banania, Curaçao—” the waiter intoned.

“Stop him!” she cried. “He’ll have Pilsner in there any minute. No, no, no! Coffee was the suggestion, and coffee it is.”

“Deux cafés.”

She lighted a cigarette. “Before I was married, I worked in
Paris for UNESCO awhile. Just a secretarial job—nothing important. But I did get around, and it did give me a new kind of interest in things. I wouldn’t say I’m fascinated by politics, but at least I know they exist.” (Her least intelligent remark to date, he thought; very much on the defensive.)

“And before, what did you know?”

She laughed. “Not very much, I’m afraid. Dances, dates, art school, even dramatic school.” She was silent a moment. The terrace was completely deserted now, and the only sounds were the sporadic twittering of sparrows down in the lower garden and the steady clicking of a typewriter at the reception desk across the terrace.

Stenham was dissatisfied; he felt he had bungled things. He had not got the answer he had been wanting; perhaps he had not put his question properly. Not the great question, which it was of no use to ask anyway, since the information had to be volunteered, but the first, vague, general query which might lead the way. Again, maybe it was not one question, but many. Why was she interested in Morocco? What did she want to see here? What was she doing here all alone, when most people refused to come even with large groups? Why was she not afraid, where had she been, how long was she staying? His intuition told him that an inquisition was not in order at this stage of the acquaintanceship, that if he put questions now, she would not take offense, would not so much as show by any word or gesture that she minded them, but would merely disappear without a word of warning, and then she would take good care that he never saw her again. This was certainly not the way he wanted things to happen.

“I don’t know what you’ve seen here in Morocco,” he said, “but I don’t think you’re likely to see anything greater than this town.”

“Oh, I know. I’m sure of that. That’s why I decided to stay awhile. Originally I was only going to give it a day. Can you imagine? I decided that even if I miss certain other things it’ll be worth it, to see more of Fez. But I’ve only got a given amount of energy. I can’t keep going night and day.”

“There are a lot of questions I’d like to ask you,” he said suddenly, in spite of himself, and a little scandalized at his own lack of control. (But perhaps this was the right way to intimacy—the neutral approach. Had not everything been completely natural so far? And what did he want, in any case, but intimacy, in the final analysis?) “The sort I can’t expect to get any intelligible answers to from our English friends.”

Her expression had not changed at all. “What sort of questions?” she said.

“About your—
our
—reactions to this place. Just what it means to you or to me. It’s sort of important, don’t you think? I mean, what do we see in it, why do we like it, what have we got in us that responds to such a city? Or perhaps you don’t respond completely, the way I do.”

“Oh, I love it! I love it!” she protested.

This was not the kind of answer he wanted, and he wondered fleetingly if she were, after all, only a very pretty American tourist, if he were not making a novel of a simple meeting. Later, he told himself; he could never get further than she was willing he should. The problem was not to discover who she was, but rather to assume that he knew, and make her willing to confirm the identification. She must never feel that his conversation was attempting to enfold her. Later, at some still unforeseeable moment, if he were lucky, he would be granted that necessary glimpse into her mind that would tell him what he wanted to know. Forget it all, he said to himself. Beyond the trees the day was hot and clear, waiting to be used.

“It’s a shame to be sitting here,” he told her.

She looked surprised. “What’s the matter with here? It’s delightful.”

“Wouldn’t you like to hire a carriage, and be driven by two clodhopping old horses all the way around the Medina? It’s a beautiful drive, if you don’t mind the sun.”

“Oh, I love the sun,” she said.

“But you have to have your head covered,” he reminded her; he felt that if it were he who made the objections for her, she might be more likely to accept.

“It’s not so bad if you’re in motion. It’s lying still on the beach that’s fatal. Anyway, I have an enormous handkerchief in my handbag I could wrap around. But—”

“Ah, you wanted to look at rooms, of course. Let’s do that now. Then afterward, if you still felt like going, we could call a cab.”

“I thought you said a carriage.”

“I know, but the nearest carriage-stand is at Bab Bou Jeloud. It would be about an hour and a half before they got here. Perhaps not quite that long,” he quickly added, fearful that she might come to the correct conclusion that the complete tour would take a very long time indeed. “It’s getting the message to the driver, and so on. You know how slow they are. What you have to do is go in a car to Bou Jeloud and take your carriage there.”

“Well, I think it would be wonderful. But you’ve probably done it ten thousand times.”

“Not that many. And certainly I’ve never done it with you.”

She laughed.

“Why don’t you look at the rooms now, and I’ll call for the taxi. It’ll be on its way while you’re looking.” He wanted to make the decision irrevocable.

“Fine, fine.” She got up, and they went across the terrace to the desk. When he came out of the telephone booth she and the receptionist had gone upstairs, up
his
stairs, to the tower. This was where he had been almost positive the man would take her, because it was there in the old wing where the cheapest rooms were. The regular tourists inevitably preferred the spacious modern bedrooms of the other parts of the hotel. He hoped the receptionist would be tactful enough not to point at his door as they went past, and say: “Monsieur Stenham’s room”; it would be like him to do something stupid like that. Then she would undoubtedly decide on another floor, or perhaps the new wing or a room down in the garden near Moss, or she might even give up the idea entirely. He walked back across the terrace and stood looking over the balustrade down into the lower garden,
feeling almost jittery and not at all pleased with himself. This unpleasant condition he attributed to the sense of failure he felt with regard to the little conversation they had carried on during coffee. Whatever happens with her, he thought, will be my fault a hundred percent. Usually when he had discovered the reason for his perturbation, the understanding sufficed to mitigate it somewhat; this time it changed nothing. “Wrong explanation,” he decided. He stood there, his eyes fixed now on one branch of trembling poplar leaves, keeping his mind a blank, because he heard voices coming down the stairs to the lobby, and he had renounced trying to discover the reason for his momentary depression. It was they; they stood a moment in the lobby talking. Then, smiling, she came out and joined him.

“Well, what’s the verdict?” he said.

“I’m calling him tonight to let him know definitely. I’ve got to do a little bookkeeping first, and see just where I am financially, before I step into high life.”

“How’d you like the rooms?”

“Oh, well, of course they’re charming. There’s one, especially, that looks like something out of Haroun er Rachid’s palace. And the views are so wonderful.”

They went up the main stairs and waited at the gate for the taxi. It came, an incredibly battered old vehicle; the driver kept the motor running while he poured water into the radiator, but as they got in it stalled. “Patience is all we need,” murmured Stenham. After a good deal of violent cranking and advice volunteered by a slowly collecting crowd of hotel employees and interested passers-by, the chauffeur managed to start the engine shuddering again, and they jounced out through the two arched gates onto the steep serpentine road that wound upward through the cemeteries and olive groves. At Bou Jeloud they stepped from the running-board of the cab into the creaking carriage. It took Stenham a while to arrange the price with the driver, an enormously fat man who wore a crimson cummerbund to match his fez, and even the final agreement was for more money than it should have been. However, he thought, a
little recklessness often made him feel more satisfied with himself; it might do that now. “Let’s go!” he cried. “
Yallah!”

CHAPTER 18

They moved slowly through the throngs of people who were on their way to and from the Joteya carrying mattresses, worn clothing, broken alarm clocks and hammered brass trays from the Seffarine. “This is their coliseum,” Stenham told her. “This is where they really enjoy themselves. A man may have a brand-new shirt or pair of shoes and be delighted with whatever it is, but in a few days the urge will get too strong, and he’ll come up here and spend a day trying to see what he can sell it for. Then he’ll sell it at a loss, of course, and buy something second-hand to take its place. He’s had his money’s worth, though: the pleasure a whole day of haggling has given him. And he goes back home happy, with an old shirt or an old pair of shoes instead of a new one. The French have caught on; they charge them admission just to get into the market, and look at the waiting-line.”

When they were finally outside the ramparts in the country, going between the dusty walls of cane, the horses established their rhythm, jangling the brass bells of their harnesses, and the carriage lurched crazily. To brace themselves, they put their feet up on the worn black leather seat facing them, their legs out straight in front of them.

“This is absolute heaven,” she said happily. “Just the right speed for seeing this landscape.”

At each new curve the vista changed: sand-colored hills, rows
of green-gray olive trees, distant glimpses of the eroded country to the east, with its bare mesa-topped mountains hard in the afternoon sunlight, a sudden view of the vast oyster-gray Medina at their feet, formless honeycomb of cubes, terraces, courtyards, backed by the groved slopes of Djebel Zalagh. “There just isn’t a straight stretch anywhere on this road. It’s all curves,” she said as he lighted a cigarette for her. Still the landscape went on unfolding, the countryside revealing its graceful variations on the pastoral theme. Small, hot ravines of bare yellow earth where only agaves grew, like giant stalks of asparagus, sudden very green orchards where people sat smiling in the shade (and the musky, almost feline odor of the fig trees was like an invisible cloud through which the carriage had to pass), an ancient, squat, stone bridge, cows standing in the mud, now and then a motionless stork sailing on a high air-current above the city. The road had dipped down to the river and climbed up again, it had gone near to the ramparts, past the arches of Bab Fteuh, veered off into the country, still descending through deserted terrain, as though it would never stop. When it flattened out, the pace slowed a little, and later, when it began to wind upward once more, the driver occasionally cracked his whip, calling a lengthy, falsetto: “Eeeee!” to the tired horses.

“Don’t let him whip them, please,” she implored, as the long leather thong descended with the sound of a firecracker for the fifth or sixth time.

Stenham knew the uselessness of arguing with an Arab about anything at all, and particularly if it had to do with the performance of his daily work, but he leaned forward, saying in a tone of authority:
“Allèche bghitsi darbou? Khallih
.” The fat man turned halfway around and said laughing: “They’re lazy. They always have to be beaten.”